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Polar Ponies and Ice Dogs

The ancient convention for naming newly discovered geographical features is fairly simple: royalty, sponsors, loved ones and crewmates come first, possibly followed by the explorer. That is how most of the landmarks around Antarctica got their names. But now a new set of names is being added — not to geographical spots, which are mostly taken, but to navigation waypoints along the main air routes between New Zealand and McMurdo Station in Antarctica.

They will bear the names of the dogs and ponies used by Robert Falcon Scott and by Roald Amundsen during their great race to the South Pole in the winter of 1911-1912, names like Bones and Nobby, Helge and Uroa. Everyone responsible for the waypoints — civil air authorities, scientific bodies — yielded to a two-year campaign by Ronald Smith, an American Air Force colonel, to honor those animals.

It is apt and lovely. Neither explorer would have succeeded without the aid of their animals. Amundsen, who reached the pole before Scott, relied solely on dogs. Scott chose small, stout Manchurian and Siberian ponies, who found the going hard and, in the end, hampered his expedition. But those ponies were also reminders of home and the object of much care from the men. On the Web site of the Scott Polar Research Institute, you can see photographs of the ponies — four in their stalls above decks, 15 under the forecastle.

“Poor patient beasts,” they were called by Apsley Cherry-Garrard, a crew member and author of the best account of Scott’s expedition. He wondered what they would remember of sailing through Antarctic waters. “It would seem strangely merciful,” he wrote, “if nature should blot out these weeks of slow but inevitable torture.” Most of us will never fly over those newly named waypoints. But we can call up the photos of the ponies aboard the Terra Nova and marvel at their beauty and acceptance.

A version of this editorial appears in print on September 30, 2010, on Page A38 of the New York edition with the headline: Polar Ponies and Ice Dogs. Today's Paper|Subscribe